Wednesday, January 10, 2007

He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called “Plant a Tree for Me,” asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two nonprofit groups that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.

Mr. Dell said the trees would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offsetting the equivalent emissions from the production of electricity for computers over three years.

Interesting. I like the idea, but I would like it even more if they offered the ability to offset the emissions from manufacturing the PC. That is estimated to use 4 times as much energy as running a PC for a standard life of 3 years. It uses the energy equivalent of 50 gallons of gasoline and I would guess it emits around 1,000 lbs of CO2.

Another thing I would love to see is a label on the PC with how much energy was used and how much carbon dioxide was emitted in its manufacturing. If Dell could do that, I think it would have a much bigger impact than the idea they are currently proposing.

Dell offers its customers free recycling of their old computers. Dell said it wants to recover about 275 million pounds of old computers from customers by 2009. “We’re on track, a little ahead, in fact, to meet our goal,” he said.

“I challenge every PC vendor in the industry to join us in providing free recycling,” Mr. Dell said. “This is a better way than government regulation.”

Good stuff. Lets keep all those heavy metals out of our garbage dumps or worse yet shipped to China for disassembly.

On the non-environmental front, Mr. Dell talked about the need to focus on improving the speed of our internet infrastructure.

He noted that high-speed networks are already available in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dubai, France, Iceland, Japan, Kuwait, Romania and Slovenia, while the United States lags behind. He said that just 44 percent of American households have a high-speed broadband connection and that only 1 percent of those homes have a fiber connection.

Now even France is ahead of us in high speed Internet access?! What is the world coming to?